


Orchid Eve

by firecat



Category: Nero Wolfe - Rex Stout
Genre: (No Stuffing), (No Weight Change), Belly Kink, Body Worship, Cold Weather, First Time, M/M, Nipple Play, Older Man/Younger Man, Oral Sex, POV First Person, Pining, Sharing Body Heat, THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, Travel, Yuletide Treat, fat appreciation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:54:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28108140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firecat/pseuds/firecat
Summary: Nero Wolfe deigns to leave his brownstone for an orchid convention. Due to a mixup at the hotel, he and Archie Goodwin end up together in a room with only one bed. However will they manage?
Relationships: Archie Goodwin/Nero Wolfe
Comments: 14
Kudos: 22
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Orchid Eve

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KannaOphelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KannaOphelia/gifts).



> I can't resist your prompts!

It was the evening before the orchid convention was to begin, and Wolfe had determined I was incompetent. He would simply have to do it himself. He approached the hotel registration desk and loomed over the desk clerk.

“My good man, surely you can’t be serious.”

Unsurprisingly, the desk clerk was not as intimidated by my employer’s imitation of a vulture as he had perhaps expected. 

“There’s _seriously_ only one room, with only one bed,” he said cheekily. “The hotel is completely booked for the orchid convention.”

“In that case, recommend to me another hotel,” Wolfe demanded.

The desk clerk handed him a piece of paper from a stack beside him. He had clearly prepared for this particular demand. “These are the other hotels in the area. But they’re likely to be full up too. I hafta say I’m amazed at how many orchid fans there are.”

“Archie!” Wolfe said in his carrying voice — unnecessarily, because I was already at his elbow, holding my hand out for the typewritten list of hotels.

I used my most fetching phone manner, but it was for naught. No other hotel in the area had two connecting rooms available, which was Wolfe’s requirement when he was forced to abandon the comforts of his brownstone and subject himself to the wilderness that was New York and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. 

(Someone who resented being summoned to the brownstone to meet Wolfe once asked me if Wolfe could not travel because he was bedridden. I told him that Wolfe was not bedridden, but houseridden.) 

Orchids were one of the few reasons Wolfe would travel. 

But without the two adjoining rooms?

Wolfe’s lip was trembling as if he were a small boy denied an ice-cream cone. 

“It’s all right, sir,” I told him. “Let’s just take the one room. I can sleep on the sofa bed or the floor.”

“I shall not be responsible for _anyone’s_ sleeping on a _sofa bed,”_ Wolfe insisted, with a shudder that set his magnificent three-hundred-pound frame to jiggling.

“Fine, I’ll curl up at the foot of your bed like a little lost dog. But don’t worry. I’m much better smelling than a dog.” 

Wolfe opened his mouth, and I expected him to tell me exactly what he thought of that suggestion. I braced particularly for the gibe that my suggestion smelled worse than a dog.

But Wolfe surprised me. He eyed me speculatively. His lips pushed in and out twice. And then he said “Very well. We shall make do with the one room and one bed.”

Internally, I sagged with relief.

Externally, I stood stoically upright, accepted the key to the room from the desk clerk, and picked up the three voluminous suitcases Wolfe had insisted on bringing. 

“Let the bellman do that,” ordered Wolfe. “I can’t have you putting your back out before the orchid conference begins.”

I grumbled, because I am a cheap bastard and bellmen need tipping. But I acquiesced, because Wolfe is a stubborn bastard, and I didn’t want to start a fight this early in our excursion. There would be plenty of time for fighting later.

~~~

“How did you manage to bring so much cold air into the room, Archie, when you had two miles of corridor to traverse before getting here?”

Wolfe was still sore about having to trudge those miles of corridor to the room, and grumpy in anticipation of having to do it at least four times a day (assuming I managed to get him to go down for his nap) for the next three days of the convention.

“I made sure to bring the chill with, so that the beer would stay cold,” I said, divesting myself of hat, gloves, and overcoat, which had been woefully inadequate protection against the Syracusean winter. I set Wolfe’s beers down on the postage-stamp-sized desk. I’d already ascertained that the room contained no barware suitable for beer. “Shall I fetch the toothbrush-glass from the bathroom?”

Wolfe grimaced. “I will relax my standards so far as to drink from the bottle, but from the toothbrush-glass? Shoot me and bury me at the crossroads if I ever accede to such a notion.”

I produced a bottle opener from my pocket and opened one of the beers. Then I perched on the room’s straight-backed chair and opened my carton of milk.

Silence reigned for a time, broken only by our sipping noises and my second use of the bottle opener. 

When Wolfe finished his second beer, he stretched and yawned hugely and said, “It is time for slumber, Archie.”

Maybe for one of us, I thought.

Once Wolfe and his yellow silk pajamas were squared away under the bedclothes, and I had brushed my teeth and put on my own (flannel) PJs, I really did curl up at the foot of the bed, with the extra blanket I had found in the closet. Because Wolfe’s feet and calves took up less room than any other parts of him. 

And for another reason as well. 

A reason I keep out of my public narratives.

I didn’t trust myself to sleep next to Wolfe.

I was pretty sure that if I tried, my hands would take advantage of my altered consciousness, relaxed vigilance, to slip under that pajama top, to luxuriate in the sensation of his skin and salt-and-pepper chest hair against my palm. They might even venture into the waistband of his pajama pants, to sink decadently into the heavy, giving flesh of his tummy, to slide underneath that luscious fold and seek parts of him that I’d never seen, but had many times imagined. 

Having never received a clear message that such attentions might be welcomed — and knowing Wolfe never hesitated to ask for what he wanted — I had kept these imaginings strictly private. 

So I would sleep at his feet like a little lost dog, longing for his master’s caress.

That was the plan, anyway.

I was exhausted from the strains of travel with a preferentially houseridden, obligate gourmet employer. So despite the unusual sleeping arrangements, I dropped off pretty quickly.

I came awake in the dark, some hours later. 

I quickly jumped out of bed, lest my shivering and tooth-chattering wake my employer. 

I was so cold that I could scarcely feel my extremities. I cursed under my breath and made my numb-footed way over to the heating unit under the window. In the pitch dark, my fingers told me it had several buttons, but I didn’t know which was which. 

Next, on tiptoe, I fumbled toward the suitcase on the valet stand. I had been allowed to claim one-third of its capacity for my clothing and toiletries. I rummaged in its inner pockets until I came upon my flashlight. 

I felt for my sports jacket and wrapped the flashlight in it. I hoped the shielded light would be enough for me to see the labels on the heater, but not so much as to wake Wolfe, who was breathing deeply and evenly in blessed slumber. 

After half an hour of poking and prodding at the heater, during which I grew colder and colder, I gave it up for useless. The heater simply was not working. It was nuts that a hotel in Syracuse should rent out a room with a nonworking heater. But probably this was the only busy weekend they’d had in months. Maybe they simply hadn’t assigned any guests to this room recently. 

Now I had a serious dilemma.

I could not sleep at the foot of the bed, or anywhere else in the room. It was simply too cold for my lissome, delicate body.

The automobile heater was also inadequate for the frigidity of an upper New York winter, I had noted on the drive up.

Nor could I spend the night awake in the hotel lobby. That would render me unfit for the burdens of the rest of the day. I must provide Wolfe with his shave, find us something bearing sufficient similarity to breakfast food and coffee, follow him through the plant show keeping notes on whatever struck his fancy and the new growers he would be making contact with. Make sure he had his afternoon rest — which he would resist, like a child reluctant to leave F.A.O. Schwartz. Look for something closely enough resembling a fine dining environment that he could comfortably treat a grower or two to dinner and orchid war stories. And then acquire the all-important after-dinner beer. 

No, I would not be able to do all that on two hours’ sleep. 

That left the only warm spot in the room. Wolfe himself. 

His avoirdupois protected him from suffering in colder temperatures, and brought suffering upon him in warmer. February usually saw him wearing only a mackintosh, on those rare occasions he ventured out. By May, he was complaining that his linen suit was too hot.

He had rolled over in his sleep, facing away from me, and there was a strip of mattress that I might just be able to balance on.

I carefully lifted the covers, which didn’t disturb him.

I tentatively crawled onto the mattress and lay down nestled against his back. His body was so warm that pressing against it was like entering the sauna after a brisk dip in Arctic water. 

(I had tried that once, when I was dating a girl from Helsinki. We broke up because I was unable to perform to standards for three weeks afterward. My performer simply refused to come out of his nest, for fear he would be subjected to another polar dunking.)

My cold, bare feet accidentally touched Wolfe’s warm ones. I braced for a vociferous complaint. But I heard none. In fact, for a few seconds, he rubbed the soles of his feet against mine, and his breathing seemed to deepen.

Once the blankets had covered my back, and Wolfe’s spare body heat had warmed my front, I was able to drift off to sleep again. My last thought before I did so was that I was fortunate. I’d gotten so cold that molesting the Wolfean expanse under the pajama top was temporarily untempting. 

I came awake in the dark, probably less than an hour later. 

I squirmed in a paroxysm of conflict. 

I was deliciously warm.

My nose was pressed against Wolfe’s upper back.

Either Wolfe had migrated toward me, or I had inched myself toward him, or we’d both moved. The result was that my performer had emerged from the opening in my PJs and nestled itself in the crease of my employer’s fundament, over his pajamas. And he was telling me that this was much, much better than the nest he had called home up until now, and he very much wished to move in, right away.

To add to the conflict, the fundament in question was wriggling a little against him, as if inviting him in for cockt—for cordials. 

I carefully pulled my smaller self away from the temptation, and took him firmly in hand. 

“You need a good thrashing, that’s what you need,” I subvocalized to him.

He jerked in protest. 

And so did the fundament. It was now rubbing against my hand, which was suddenly telling me it had much better things to do than act as a chaperone for the meeting that had been about to take place.

“I want to go exploring,” my hand told me. My palm began to sweat and itch. 

I slowly extracted it from where it was trapped. I gradually let it drift upward, along the hip, then slipped it under the pajama top. I allowed it to trace the tempting crease between hip and belly, and spread out across the expanse there. Until finally it rested against the furry skin just a few inches below my employer’s navel.

Wolfe’s breathing changed subtly. 

To a casual observer, he would still have seemed to be sleeping. 

I was an intimate observer. Not because I sat in his bedroom watching him sleep. But because he sometimes nodded off at his desk in the evening, if a problem with a case had stumped him, or he’d grown bored of the book he was reading. Just from being in the room, working at my desk during those evening naps, and being keenly attuned to him as only a faithful dog can be, I knew the alterations in his sleep noises that meant he was dropping deeper, or shifting toward wakefulness.

His voice was so low as to be almost inaudible.

“Archie.”

I went as still as I could. Ancient marble statues had nothing on me in that moment.

“Yes, sir?” I breathed, preparing to leap out of bed, wracking my mind for the right words of apology.

“Pray continue,” came his voice again. “Most…pleasing.”

Now I was shivering again, but for a very different reason.

I still moved tentatively, concerned that he might wake more fully and change his mind, but my hand began to explore more of him.

And as I explored, his body began to move. 

Wolfe’s body moved against my hand like an ocean lifting itself toward a springtide moon.

And then I heard, very quietly, that rumble of satisfaction I’d grown so familiar with. The one he gave when he savored the first bite of his favorite dish of Felix’s. When he lowered himself into his desk chair after a taxing afternoon in the plant rooms. When he had solved a particularly gnarly, and lucrative, case. 

That sound shivered through me, and I threw all my doubts to the wind. I surged up his body, wrapping his magnificent chest with my arm, and planting soft kisses under his ear, along his stubbly cheek. And as he turned his head toward me, a harder, more lingering one on his mouth.

Wolfe growled. He rolled over, more nimbly than most would expect of someone with such bulk. But I knew better what he was capable of. 

He was facing me now, and he took my head in his hands. Leaned his forehead against mine. The room was still pitch black, but I imagined I could discern an inner glow in his eyes.

“I want you, Archie. I want you like nothing else on Earth,” he rumbled. “But I know you are a flirt. I beg you, do not start something with me unless you intend to see it through.”

“Sir — Wolfe —“

 _“Nero,”_ he said.

 _“Nero,”_ I repeated with fervor. It was the first time I’d used his Christian name to address him. “I swear to you by everything I hold dear, I will see it through if it’s the last thing I do.” 

“But what do you hold dear, Archie? I’ve never been clear on that point.”

“My porkpie hat,” I said. “The one with the red feather. And...you.”

Wolfe was silent for a moment.

“Kiss me again,” he demanded then. 

We kissed. It was briefly tentative, then our lips melted together, our tongues intertwined, as if we’d been doing it all our lives. Wolfe pulled my body against his. I sank into that warmth and bulk, and shoved one leg in between his thighs. My hands roamed over his face and head, his powerful back. I ground my cock against his belly. 

He growled again. He removed his hand from my head and then it was my turn to growl, as he slipped the hand into the waistband of my PJs and cupped my cock and balls.

“My word, Archie,” he said, his fingertips sliding along my rigid length from base to tip. “It’s even bigger than I imagined.”

“This is about the biggest it’s ever been,” I told him, shuddering with the touch of his fingers on me.

He handled me with the same sure dexterity he brought to his every movement. With keen attention to the effects of his manipulations, the same that he brought to interviews with clients and suspects. 

He had never touched me in this way, and because our lives had been so intertwined, I knew he hadn’t touched anyone this way for years. But he learned me so quickly that in the space of a few minutes, he had zeroed in on what brought me the most pleasure. Which grips and strokes. What rhythms and pressures. 

And I was lost in it. I, Archie Goodwin, the poster boy for standing always a little aside from it all, for always keeping my head, was writhing and sobbing his name. Begging for I knew not what, as his low purrs of satisfaction surrounded me. 

I knew I was scant minutes away from the point of no return when he said “Hold still,” and paused his sweet torments. I heard the rustle of silk, and I realized he was unbuttoning his pajama top. 

I reached for the nipple nearest me.

“Not yet,” Wolfe said, brushing my hand away. “Take off your pajamas and then straddle my chest,” he demanded. 

Taking off my clothes made me cold again. And sitting across his chest was a slightly painful stretch to my inner thighs. I gladly bore both to feel the tickle of his furry chest on my ass and balls. I slowly rocked back and forth, on top of him.

“Give me that cock, Archie. I want it in my mouth. Now.” 

“But—“ It felt wrong somehow to do something so dominating to my employer.

“If I don’t have your cock in my mouth in ten seconds I won’t answer for the consequences,” said Wolfe in his sternest voice.

I chuckled at myself for thinking this act would involve my dominating him. The very idea. I moved up and felt my cock slide over his lips. I felt that discerning tongue bathing the shaft, then the full lips encircling the tip, and then the moist heat of his mouth engulfing it. His large hands came up to grip my hips, and he pulled me back and forth, controlling the depth of the penetration. 

I struggled to stay upright, but in a handful of seconds I collapsed against the headboard. My nerves simply abandoned their job of controlling my muscles in the face of that onslaught of pleasure.

At first he was keeping the penetration shallow, but as he continued to suck and lick me, he shoved my hips forward, taking more and more of me into his mouth. If there’d been any more room for disbelief in my dazed brain, I would have sworn it was some kind of fevered delirium that led me to imagine my cock taken so deep into my beloved’s throat that I could feel him swallowing around it. I tried to pull away to let him breathe, but he had my hips in such a grip that I couldn’t move an inch. I just had to _take_ this, the sucking, the squeezing, his lips against my pubic bone. I had to give him the long, excruciating climax he pulled out of me, as I cried out his name and jerked against him again and again, spilling copiously into his mouth.

Some minutes later, I was lying in the crook of his arm, temporarily spent, and he was still obscenely licking and smacking his lips. 

“Archie, do you have any idea how long I’ve imagined doing that to you?” he asked. 

“Not as long as I’ve imagined doing a similar thing to you,” I told him. 

“I doubt it. Regardless. Why did it take you this long to divulge your interest in engaging in such activities with me?”

“It hardly seems the thing to suggest to an employer,” I pointed out. “Especially one so seemingly comfortable in his bachelor ways. Plus, you overpampered me.”

“What the devil do you mean by that?”

“You let me have my own room and bed, with a heater.”

“I shall take away your heater forthwith,” he told me.

My energy was starting to return. My hand crept toward the nipple I had been denied earlier. This time, Wolfe allowed me to touch it. And pinch it. And palm the fleshy mound underneath, exactly the right size to nestle in my hand.

“The English language has a long and storied history,” I remarked. “Why has it no word for this?” I squeezed it. 

“It’s a male breast,” said Wolfe authoritatively. Then he sighed as I returned my attention to the now-puckered nipple. 

“That sounds so dry and technical,” I complained. “There’s nothing dry and technical about these.” I wasn’t able to say any more after that, because my mouth was full. 

“What do you call the ones you encounter on women?” Wolfe wanted to know.

“Sweater puppies,” I mumbled around the nipple in my mouth.

Wolfe made a noise of disgust, which shaded into a groan of pleasure as I discovered he liked to be bitten on his male sweater puppies.

After a while, I turned my attention to his belly. I couldn’t get enough of it — kissing, licking, petting, gripping the delicious rolls of flesh. I moaned with pleasure as I worshipped it, and my cock began to grow again. 

I had crawled down the bed until I was kneeling between his legs, hugging his belly and rubbing my cheek over its furry expanse.

“And what about you?” I asked.

“Pray express your whole thought, Archie. I am not a mind reader.”

“If you’ve wanted my cock in your mouth for so long, why didn’t you tell me? You have no trouble ordering me to do anything else,” I pointed out. 

“I do not recall telling you that the job involved sexual services,” Wolfe said. 

“You didn’t tell me that it would involve attending meetings of Les Quinze Maîtres either, but it did and I did,” I reminded him.

“Pah. Must I explain?”

“No, of course not, Nero. I’m just curious.”

That silenced Wolfe for a full ten seconds.

“A rare moment of sincerity from you, Archie. I am touched.”

He made it sound sarcastic, but I knew he meant it, and he knew I knew.

“Several reasons,” he went on at last. “One, for as long as I’ve known you, you’ve given every indication of being entirely heterosexual.”

“Come now. I’ve talked to you about attractive men before.” Since my memory is very tenacious, I was able to remind him of some of those occasions. 

“Saying a man is attractive and saying you desire to have relations with him are two different things.”

He had me there.

“Is there anything else?” I asked.

“How many women have you dated since you came into my employ?” he asked me.

I counted in my head.

“More than all my fingers, but fewer than all my fingers plus all my toes,” I told him.

“That is reason number two. You have been a loyal employee to me, but in affairs of the heart — or body — you’ve shown every evidence of being a will o’ the wisp.”

“Hey,” I interjected. “I haven’t ill-treated anyone. Almost all the women I’ve dated have remained friends with me afterwards.”

“Exactly. However desperately I have wanted you, I am not the sort of person who wants to date Archie Goodwin for a short while and remain friends with him afterwards.” 

He had me again. I certainly couldn’t imagine it either.

Wolfe went on. “I am a person who relies on intuition, but only when backed up by evidence. I admit my intuition sometimes told me it was cowardly not to express my desires. But the evidence said I was being wise to avoid a romantic entanglement with you.”

“‘I used to be idiotically romantic. I still am, but I've got it in hand,’” I quoted. He’d said it in a very different context, but I suspected it applied here as well. 

“Yes,” he confirmed simply.

“What else?” I pursued.

“You are the most handsome man I know,” Wolfe said. 

“Pah yourself. I’m only a two-bit Cary Grant.”

“To my eyes, Cary Grant is a two-bit Archie Goodwin.”

I was genuinely surprised. Wolfe had rarely expressed opinions about human attractiveness to me before. He reserved such statements for French sauces. And orchids.

“That view would seem to argue in favor of your letting me know that you wanted me, not against.”

“No, Archie. Have you not noticed that couples usually match each other in degree of attractiveness?”

“I have noticed the general trend.” 

“I considered you — what is that execrable sports metaphor? — ‘out of my league,’” he said, matter-of-factly. “We are a good match professionally. There are things I offer you, and things you offer me. Romantically, sexually, however, I have little to offer you. I’m much older than you. Leaving attractiveness out of it, my body has many limitations. I am set in my ways and a homebody. You are lively and adventurous. You deserve a closer match for a partner.” 

I tried to give Wolfe’s reasons the attention they deserved. He was a much smarter and wiser man than I, with vast experience of the world that I (having lived only in Ohio and New York City) had not. 

Was I letting my lust run away with me? Would I hurt Wolfe? Endanger the best job I’ve ever had or was ever likely to have? 

Our years together flashed through my mind in an instant. So many memories. Shared experiences. Squabbles. Mutual satisfactions. 

I crawled up Wolfe’s body. I lay with my full weight on him, and heard him sigh with pleasure at the pressure of my body against him. I kissed his mouth, his cheeks, his ears. Found wetness there. Tasted it.

“Have you been weeping?” I asked him, in shock.

“Do not ask me that question,” he grumbled. But I heard the hitch in his voice. He had been. 

“I’m just a foolish Archie,” I told him. “But the way it looks from here, you have everything to offer me that I want,” I told him. “Professionally. Romantically. And...” My lips touched the shell of his ear, and I whispered as quietly as I could, “I _really_ want to suck your cock right now.”

Nero let go a long breath. 

“All right, Archie. Suck my cock, and we’ll see how it goes from there.”

Lying between his legs, savoring the taste of him in my mouth, hearing him repeat my name in tones of the utmost pleasure, I opened my eyes momentarily and saw the first dawn light seeping through the curtains. 

It would definitely be a challenge getting through the day, with what little sleep I’d had.

But, on the bright side, Nero probably wouldn’t be as resistant as usual to an afternoon “nap.”


End file.
